This ain’t no scrap-eating, junkyard dog.
The NATO military dog captured by the Taliban in a fierce firefight won’t eat the gruel that local Afghan mutts wolf down.
So his captors have had to cook up a human diet of chicken and beef kebabs for the reddish-brown Belgian Malinois, the terror group said Friday.
And unlike local dogs who will sleep anywhere, the Taliban had to find blankets for their prized catch.
The pooch has been named DaGarwal — meaning “colonel” in the Pashto language — and his new owners are thinking about turning him against his former masters.
“It’s always possible that we could use the dog, since it has been trained,” said Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid.
Or they might work out an exchange of POWs. “If someone offers a trade for it then we can think about that,” Mujahid said.
The dog went missing after a Dec. 23 bid by coalition forces to drive the insurgents out of Alingar Valley in Afghanistan’s eastern Laghman province.
But his plight became public on Thursday when the Taliban posted a propaganda video on Twitter showing the mournful-looking Malinois surrounded by five fighters carrying guns and grenades.
They said he was known as “Colonel” to his NATO handlers.
Tribesmen in Alingar Valley told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that the dog was being held by a notoriously brutal Taliban commander who used the nom de guerre Abu Zarqawi, just like the name of the bloodthirsty al-Qaeda leader killed by a US bombing in 2006.
But the Taliban indicated the dog was being treated like a real colonel.
Mujahid said by telephone that the dog is being held in a “safe place” in Laghman and his condition was “OK.”
“He was not injured and is not being mistreated,” he said.
“It is not like the local dogs which will eat anything and sleep anywhere,” he added. “We have to prepare him proper food and make sure he has somewhere to sleep properly.”
NATO officials said Friday that Colonel had accompanied a British special forces SAS unit in a night mission. A British captain is believed to have died in the firefight.